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The Health-Law Rollout

The main purpose of the 2010 Affordable Care Act is to create a near-universal system of health insurance for the country. About 30 million Americans are expected to gain coverage under the law. This is the Wall Street Journal’s streaming coverage of the rollout.

Botched Launch of Health Site Blamed on Poor Coordination

By Amy Schatz

Left to right, senior vice president of CGI Federal Cheryl Campbell, group executive vice president for Optum/QSSI Andrew Slavitt, corporate counsel for Equifax Workforce Solutions Lynn Spellecy, and program director for Serco John Lau are sworn in during a hearing on implementation of the Affordable Care Act before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday.

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WASHINGTON—No one in the government made sure the many complex parts of the federal health-insurance website worked together properly, and testing of the complete site didn’t take place until two weeks before its Oct. 1 launch, contractors said at the first congressional hearings into the matter.

“It seems like we’ve got several fingers but no palm here,” said Rep. Michael Burgess (R., Texas), as contractors for the site repeatedly pointed blame at each other and at the Obama administration.

The website’s botched launch has become the biggest threat to the success of President Barack Obama’s health law, just days after Democrats beat back a Republican bid to defund it. More Democrats said Thursday that penalties on those who lack health insurance—a linchpin of the law—should be delayed because of the difficulties many people have had in navigating the site.

The contractors said each of their pieces worked more or less as intended, but the HealthCare.gov website was nearly paralyzed when they were bolted together. The federal agency overseeing the site also took on the job of integrating the many parts of the system—an unusual arrangement for such a complex project.

Testing of the complete package took place in the final two weeks before the launch and revealed problems, contractors said. But they couldn’t name who in the government was responsible for addressing the problems or making key decisions.

An executive of a UnitedHealth Group Inc. unit said at the hearing that his company learned of one key change—disabling a feature allowing users to browse for plans anonymously—about 10 days before the website went live.

“We don’t know who made the decision, when it was made, or why it was made,” said Andrew Slavitt, group executive vice president of UnitedHealth’s Optum unit.

At the 4½-hour hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Republican and Democratic lawmakers sparred again over the merits of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, but they were unexpectedly united in their disgust over the rollout of the federal insurance exchange, which is serving consumers in 36 states that declined to set up their own exchanges.

“I do believe this will be fixed, but it’s been painful and we need to make sure the American people have access to a decent website before Dec. 15,” said Rep. Jerry McNerney (D., Calif.). That is that last date people can sign up to have coverage on Jan. 1.

Asked Thursday who was the “quarterback” for the mistakes, White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to name names. “This is on us. And that goes from the president on down,” he said.

The Obama administration is bracing for two more hearings on this issue next week, including one that will feature Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. This week, the White House got more directly involved, bringing in an experienced administration troubleshooter, Jeffrey Zients, to help oversee fixes to the site.

The White House also said a team of the “best and the brightest” from Silicon Valley and elsewhere would assist in the repair, but it hasn’t named any of them. Contractors at the hearing said they couldn’t name any of those people either.

Lawmakers at the hearing repeatedly pressed the contractors to describe the decision-making process but got little insight beyond the names of a few senior officials at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, the HHS agency in charge of the site.

The agency on Thursday started daily briefings on the site’s progress.

“We know the experience on HealthCare.gov has been frustrating for many Americans…with error messages and time-outs,” said spokeswoman Julie Bataille at the inaugural briefing. Asked about the agency’s role as its own system integrator, she said: “Obviously, due to a compressed time frame, the system wasn’t tested enough.”

On Wednesday, the administration said that people won’t have to pay a tax penalty in 2014—which starts at $95, or 1% of taxable income—so long as they sign up for health coverage by March 31. The deadline had previously been ambiguous, with some calculating that it would come by mid-February.

Some Democrats said the coverage penalty should be delayed further, echoing Republican criticism that it wouldn’t be fair to punish people for failing to find their way through a troubled website. Sen. Kay Hagan (D., N.C.) said the penalty should be waived for two months, and she also spoke in unusually harsh terms about the administration’s handling of the rollout.

The administration “must be fully transparent in their efforts to get the website working. Anything less than complete disclosure and accountability is not acceptable,” she said.

At Thursday’s hearing, the lead contractor on the site, CGI Group Inc.’s American subsidiary, said its systems worked well when tested independently.

“Our portion of the application worked as designed,” said Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president of CGI. “The end-to-end testing was the responsibility of CMS.”

She said that two weeks of testing was inadequate. “We would have liked to have months,” she said.

UnitedHealth’s Optum unit was responsible for developing a data hub, which collects information from various federal agencies to allow the system to decide if an applicant qualifies for a federal subsidy. It also built an identification system that quickly became overwhelmed on Oct. 1 when people tried to create accounts.

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D., Calif.), whose district includes parts of Silicon Valley, expressed amazement that the contractors weren’t prepared to handle the volume that the site experienced. HHS officials said more than 2.8 million people visited HealthCare.gov on Oct. 1, when it launched.

“You keep speaking about unexpected volumes…that really sticks in my craw. There are thousands of websites who carry far more traffic,” she said. “Amazon.com doesn’t crash a week before Christmas.”

Traffic volume was blamed for early problems, but later, other problems became apparent, including garbled information sent to insurers after people signed up.

Despite the issues, Ms. Bataille of the Medicare agency said nearly 700,000 Americans have completed applications for health insurance. She said that figure included those signing up through 14 state-run exchanges, which have generally had fewer problems, but didn’t offer a breakdown.